James the Robot Bartender Serves Drinks in Binary

A robot bartender being developed by European researchers is handy at dishing out tipple and is getting better at sifting through the conflicting signals put out by customers.

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We may have to adjust the Three Laws of Robotics to include something about 86ing drunks if a robot bartender being developed by European researchers is able to find employment in an actual pub.

A positronic barkeep named "James" is finally up and running after several years of development by an EU-funded team at Bielefeld University in Germany and other research and educational institutions in Germany, Scotland, and Greece, according to BBC News. James is now able to interact conversationally with thirsty customers, serve them drinks, andmost cruciallypossesses the ability to "read" the body language of patrons to determine if they would like to make an order or not.

This last capability has proven the most difficult to program into the robot bartender, according to the scientists behind the James Project. Computers like the one powering James are far better at working through linear, logical tasks than they are at coping with the unpredictability and conflicting signals of interaction with humans, particularly in a fast-paced, noisy, and chaotic environment like a bar, according to Dr. Jan de Ruiter of the Psycholinguistics Research Group at Germany's Bielefeld University.

"Currently, we are working on the robot's ability to recognize when a customer is bidding for its attention. Thus, we have studied the process of ordering a drink in real life," de Ruiter told Gizmag.

It doesn't help that, in the case of getting a bartender's attention, people often don't actually do the things they think will best indicate they want a drink. Research by de Ruiter and his colleagues at pubs and other drinking venues in Germany and Scotland indicated that customers who wanted a drink tended to simply stare fixedly at the bartender and do nothing elseeven though when interviewed, those same people said they did things like wave cash to get their server's attention.

So the challenge for James's developers was to program the robot to detect from often subtle body language which customers to approach with a request for an order, signals that had to be sifted from a good deal of other visuals and loud noises in the cacophonous environment of a crowded bar or nightclub.

This entailed nothing less than giving James "social skills" to match or at least approximate those of human bartenders, who are able to quickly process such information and make split-second decisions about which customers to address during busy workshifts. As the James Project team explains:

"As robots become more integrated into our daily lives, they must increasingly deal with situations in which socially appropriate interaction is vital. In such settings, it is not enough for a robot simply to plan its actions to perform particular tasks; instead, the robot must also be able to satisfy social goals and obligations that arise through interactions with people in real-world settings. As a result, a robot requires not only the necessary physical skills to perform tasks in the world, but also the appropriate social skills to understand and respond to the intentions and needs of the people it interacts with."

In other words, getting a robot to prepare drinks properly is actually pretty easyit's making your android bartender a good people robot that's the tough sled. So how well does James do? From the video below, it appears that the robot bartender's bedside manner still leaves a lot to be desired (and curiously, it doesn't speak German despite being born there), but at least James comes off as halfway competent, perhaps at the level of a bar back trainee.

And there's an end game here, as well. Replacing human bartenders isn't the real objective of the James Project, though a robot barkeep would obviously be immune to stealing, overpouring, calling in sick, and all the other foibles real people bring to the job. Instead, researchers like de Ruiter are hoping to take robotics to a new level, where robot interactions with humans become more natural, intuitive, and even circuitousjust like encounters between two real-life people are.

Damon Poeter got his start in journalism working for the English-language daily newspaper The Nation in Bangkok, Thailand. He covered everything from local news to sports and entertainment before settling on technology in the mid-2000s. Prior to joining PCMag, Damon worked at CRN and the Gilroy Dispatch. He has also written for the San Francisco Chronicle and Japan Times, among other newspapers and periodicals.
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